Marketing needs a new business purpose. Without a new business purpose, marketing will have no purpose. Instead of a profession, marketing has become a trade: the trade of managing and executing marketing and media tactics.
The reason why companies have worked photocopy business plans for so long is because they never thought to work any other way. It just seemed too risky.
Having spent much of my career as a marketing professional in a marketing driven company, Hallmark Cards, and having spent many of those years in a division entitled Product Discovery & Development, I understand that the primary value of marketing is to discover unmet customer needs and to develop products, services and experiences to meet those needs.
When I teach the brand management elective to MBA students, we explore case studies of companies getting it right and wrong. One of the most common observations that keeps coming up has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with gender.
There are many today who advocate direct response marketing to the exclusion of other marketing channels. These are very silly people.
